Scorched #18 // Review
Jessica Priest has been through a lot in her life. ECT as a teenager. It’s been years since then. Kind of a lot has happened. Starting a war in the Middle East. Lots of killing. Lots of death. Intense demonic activity. Her latest adventure involves a virus that had been lying dormant beneath the permafrost. Now, it’s attacking her and the team in Scorched #18. Writer Sean Lewis and artist Stephen Segovia rush Jessica and company through a long and nearly decipherable combat that is given vivid life courtesy of colorist Ulises Arreola. Demons battle demons in reasonably well-articulated action in another issue with the Scorched team.
It’s a virus with no cure, capable of killing thousands. It’s out after the Scorched team. Everyone’s going to try a subtly different defense against it...and all of that defense will take on the form of big, epic-looking combat between two forces. Jessica and company are going to find themselves face-to-face with giant monolithic beasts as well. The Scorched team will find itself in combat with demonic forces. It’s going to be a chaotic battle. There’s no telling what might happen.
Lewis doesn’t give a whole lot of definition between any of the warriors. There IS a sense of intensity about the combat itself, but there isn’t much in the script to define the difference between one battle and the next. It’s all a lovely, little combat that sprawls out in a cold space and continues to inhabit that space until the issue reaches its cliffhanger climax in the closing splash page. Lewis delivers way too much of the backstory in narration that feels a little too disconnected from the action in the panel, but it all fits together respectably in the flow of action across the page.
Segovia places the action on the page with a sharp eye for kinetics. Giant, towering demonic forces contrast well against the smaller heroes in a way that lends some depth to the action. As well-composed as all of the action is on the page, it would lack a substantial amount of energy without the aid of Arreola’s deliciously garish colors. The giants’ eyes and mouths glow a beautifully radiant green. Magical power glows in stylish reds and greens. There isn’t a whole lot of variation in the drama of combat. There are lots of shouts and grimaces on the page. It all looks quite appealing, though--inhabiting the endless tapestry of detail-oriented, superpowered conflict of the sort that has been bashing its way across the comics pages for decades.
Lewis and company are working with tropes that all seem to fill the same space they always have. There are countless tropes running through this particular superhero team book. It’s actually kind of fun to count all of the things Lewis and company have “ripped off” of pre-existing comics. Ideas twist and wind their way through superhero comics...continuing to echo down through the decades. It’s fun to see those echoes continue, but it never produces anything terribly memorable.
